The Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) business has grown in the past 10 years with the widespread deployment of wireless devices, personal computers, Internet, and broadband networks to represent a value chain of over $3 trillion worldwide, including content providers, advertisers, telecommunications companies and electronics suppliers (White Paper Wireless Social Networking from iSuppli, July 2008). In the next decade wireless social networking products, applications, components, and advertising will generate more than $2.5 trillion in revenue by 2020, according to iSuppli (Press Release, June 4, 2008 http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=12930).
During the next decade it is anticipated that mobile devices, such as cellular telephones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDA), will become the primary channel for viewing content from or accessing the Internet (World Wide Web) for consumers and that many applications such as social networking, email, and financial transactions will have moved largely into the wireless realm providing the degree and type of ubiquitous connection that consumers demand. At the same time, it is anticipated that this evolution with be accompanied by the creation of a new generation of applications that will greatly expand the appeal and utility of these devices.
Today there are essentially three levels of users, these being immediate family and close friends, extended friends, and shared interest groups. Today users interact sporadically, but intensely, with extended friends through games, avatars, and general updates and information. Users with common interests communicate in ways that extend into business. The popularity of social networking in business, for trading, online collaboration, and virtual meetings, is also likely to spur advancement of mobile devices equipped for content viewing and sharing and accordingly spur the dominance of mobile devices for other applications including finance, electronic mail, messaging, music etc.
Accordingly, as users move to such wireless devices as their primary means of communicating, accessing content, and using applications in the next decade, the technological innovations will also have to appear within the semiconductor and display industries globally. Increasingly displays will emerge as the most valuable portion of the mobile-device value chain, with makers of portable wireless devices stressing differentiation via superior display technology rather than features which have been important to date including battery lifetime, weight, size, full keyword, etc.
Within a large number of applications on wireless devices, where the user is generally outside their residence, office or other space that is essentially personal to them, there are requirements for enhanced security of information. This information may be that provided and displayed to the user and may include for example a message from a family member, friend, business associate, financial institution, or alternatively be an image, flash movie or other visual media. Similarly, this data may that being provided/entered by the user and may include for example a message to a family member, friend, business associate, or financial institution, a user name associated with a web based service provider, a password associated with a web based service provider, a password for accessing the currently locked mobile device etc.
Historically the developments relating to the security of information exchanged between two users be they individuals, businesses, web services, etc have been focused to the actual transmission process/processes and ensuring that attacks such a “relay attacks”, “birthday attack” or “man-in-the-middle attacks”. As such activities therein have focused to cryptographic techniques such that terms including symmetric key, asymmetric key, public key, and private key have become in many instances part of the knowledge or ordinary people as security breaches occur with financial institutions etc. Accordingly, cryptographic protocolssuch as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) provide security and data integrity for communications over networks such as the Internet. TLS and SSL encrypt the segments of network connections at the Transport Layer end-to-end. Several versions of the protocols are in wide-spread use in applications like web browsing, electronic mail, Internet faxing, instant messaging and voice-over-IP (VoIP).
Beyond such communication applications security requirements exist for the fledgling electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications being deployed with mobile devices. In the period April-June 2009 (Q2 2009) e-commerce was $32.4 billion but still only represented approximately 3.6% of the overall retail sales market in Q2 2009 of $900 billion (US Census Bureau “2nd Quarter 2009 Retail E-Commerce Sales Report” released on Aug. 17, 2009). Accordingly e-commerce extends security requirements such as identification and authentication, authorization and access control, data integrity, confidentiality, non-repudiation, trust, and regulation exploiting technologies such as Internet security, firewalls, cryptography, digital signatures, secure email, public key infrastructure, intellectual property protection and watermarking, Java security, database security, secure electronic payments such as secure electronic transaction (SET), digital cash, digital cheques, and smart card technology.
However, despite the significant investments by Governments, financial institutions, and other enterprises in resources, ingenuity, infrastructure etc to protect individuals and enterprises there still exists the ability for a breach of security to occur as the user credentials in accessing their account, a particular transaction or their electronic mobile device for example can be obtained by a malevolent individual acting alone or in concert with others. For example, the malevolent individual may film the keypad entries made by a series of users when accessing their financial institutions via an automatic teller machine, they may establish a dummy terminal within a retail establishment to capture user information, or they may simply be next to an individual and be looking sideways towards the user when they enter their username or password for example to access their financial institution from their mobile device whilst sitting on a bus, train, or other form of mass transportation, be sitting in a coffee shop, restaurant, library or other public space or be standing in the street. Equally a malevolent individual or individual snooping may view any information displayed on the user's LCD display of their mobile device which can be content that is personal, business, financial, adult etc.
Typically, the displays on their mobile devices, be they laptops, palmtops, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) are liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Unfortunately for users entering access information such as usernames, passwords etc into their mobile devices the historical drive within the TMT business has been to seek to increase the viewing angle of LCD displays for their use within televisions, computers, mobile devices etc. Accordingly, the malevolent user with time has been granted better visibility of the information displayed, entered and generated upon a user's mobile device.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to limit the external viewing angle of LCD displays on mobile devices. However, whilst appearing a high volume market LCD displays for mobile devices leverage manufacturing scale by combining a common design and manufacturing platform with the LCD displays for televisions or computers. For example, a single 18″ LCD display for a laptop computer is the equivalent of 22 2.5″ LCD displays for an Apple iPhone™ or Blackberry Curve™, and a single 42″ LCD television by contrast is the equivalent of 120 2.5″ LCD displays for typical mobile devices. Hence, selling 2 million televisions requires the same overall LCD manufacturing capacity as does 240 million mobile devices.
As such in order to maintain this manufacturing leverage it would be beneficial for the limitation of viewing angle for mobile devices to be an element that is either added to the LCD display or is a modification to an element within the design that can be introduced without changing the overall manufacturing process flow.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a means of limiting the viewing angle of the LCD display for a mobile device in order to reduce the potential for information displayed on the LCD display being viewed by other individuals in the immediate vicinity of the mobile device user.